14 DAY TRIAL // You don’t even have to be a fan of Angelina Jolie’s work, either as an actress or as a humanitarian, to know that she had some drug problems when she was younger, having admitted to them herself. A video shot by her alleged former dealer in 1998 has now been released, allegedly offering an idea of how bad things were for her at the time.
Radar Online has it: it’s almost 17 minutes’ worth of footage showing Jolie pacing to and fro in a room in her New York apartment, talking on the phone with her father Jon Voigt about buying a house and about making her brother James Haven feel “like a man” by getting him his own checkbook.
She has her blonde hair in a bun and she’s wearing a black dress and absolutely no makeup.
She seems tired and agitated but, other than that, there’s nothing weird or illegal happening in front of the camera. If anything, there’s a certain feeling that Franklin Meyer, the alleged dealer, is stepping over some boundaries by videotaping her while she’s having this very personal conversation.
However, Radar says that there’s more to this than meets the eye. The tab describes Jolie as “thin, ragged, and sore-covered,” pacing “the floor of her squalid NYC apartment, picking at her pock-marked skin and chattering frantically after scoring a delivery of heroin and cocaine.” As in, if you know where to look in the video, you will see all the signs of a heavy drug user.
This was just one of the many deliveries Meyer claims to have made at Jolie’s place in the late ‘90s.
He’s gone previously on the record saying that she would consume huge quantities of drugs at a time, calling him up to deliver for her about 3 times a week and taking the drugs right there in front of him. She never tried to hide from him, he was saying some years back.
He’s releasing this video now, and there’s really no need to try and figure out what his justification for it might be. Even if she’s not doing drugs on camera, the mere fact that he has footage of Jolie taken in the privacy of her own home, as “squalid” as it might be, must have made Meyer a rich man. One such video can’t possibly sell for peanuts.
As noted above, Jolie never made a secret of her troubled past or, for that matter, for the fact that she was once addicted to drugs. She managed to kick the habit a very long time ago and to turn her life around completely but being the most famous woman on earth does come with this disadvantage: the past can always come back to haunt you.